Energy Efficient Sensor Control Scheme for Home Networks based on DLNA-ZigBee Gateway Architecture

With the rapid growth of device and computer system technologies, DLNA-compliant digital appliances have been becoming widespread in home network environments. Controlling home sensors via home networks will also be important in the near future. ZigBee has been expected to be as one of such sensor networks (because of its low power consumption). This paper proposes a gateway architecture that interconnects DLNA and ZigBee, and enables energy efficient sensor control. This architecture allows interconnection between two networks and plug-and-play between one another's appliances. Energy efficient sensor control proposed in this paper is achieved by the dynamic switching between unicast and broadcast in the sensor data gathering in accordance with the network conditions. This paper shows the effectiveness of the sensor data gathering method by measuring the power consumption after implementing this sensor data gathering method into the gateway.